state communism as a religion

[ichneumon]

challenge:

find a definition of religion that includes:

1. sufi islam
2. theravada buddhism
3. neosiberian shamanism
4. scientology
5. gnosticism

yet excludes state communism as practiced in the USSR, PRC and north korea.

(this should be fun)

(yes, NoXion, but it's in the right forum, no?)

[LSD]

Easy, a structured belief in the existance of the supernatural.

Any other questions?

[redstar2000]

Is Marxism a "Religion"? (http://www.redstar2000papers.com/theory.php?subaction=showfull&id=1101735552&archive=&cnshow=headlines&start_from=&ucat=&)

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/223.gif

[Fistful of Steel]

re·li·gion Audio pronunciation of "religion" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-ljn)
n.

1.
1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
2. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

The first three cross out marxism. Only going by the fourth definition here, which most people don't use when they refer to religion, makes marxism a religion. And going by that my religion could be masturbation, or shitting.

(And as I've already contended Buddhism is not a religion.)

[Goatse]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28 2006, 07:33 PM
Easy, a structured belief in the existance of the supernatural.

Any other questions?
QED. :lol:

[VermontLeft]

yeah that was a pretty devastating post LSD (:wub:) :lol:

seriously thouigh whats the fucking point of this thread anyway? so that some whackjob anti-marxist can say that marxism is "religion"?

isn't that just petty name calling? i mean really, what useful could possibly come out of an ignorant juvenile topic like this? :huh: :huh:

[Goatse]

Shouldn't he be restricted, anyway? He's obviously not a communist... unless he's just a religidiot annoyed at us flaming religion all the time?

[LSD]

The thing is I can't actually figure out what he believes one way or another. So far he's only really posted on Buddhism and Vegetarianism.

ichneumon, I don't suppose you'd mind telling us where you stand politically? You clearly oppose the "state communism" of the USSR/PRC/DPRK. But what's your position on communism in general?

An answer would be appreciated and would go a long way in determing you future status on this board. :)

[overlord]

Is Marxism a Religion?

1) A Holy Book whose word cannot be doubted.

2) Veneration for ancestors, Marx, "Lenin lives always". Kim the Great leader will be remembered forever.

3) Everyone must convert or it will not work. If they do not convert they will perish in the pit of flame.

4) You shall not worship false Gods.

5) Escatological end-time utopia of happyness on Earth


Of course it isn't a religion. What sort of fool would think that?

[ColinH]

1) A Holy Book whose word cannot be doubted.

Odd, seeing how much of this forum is devoted to debate, criticism and the creation of new ideas. We can't all be so blindly devoted I suppose.


2) Veneration for ancestors, Marx, "Lenin lives always". Kim the Great leader will be remembered forever.

Yeah, I see a lot of Kim fans in the crowd here.


3) Everyone must convert or it will not work. If they do not convert they will perish in the pit of flame.

Marxism is a theory grounded in objectivity, not an ideology. Noone is required to convert to anything for communism to "work."


4) You shall not worship false Gods.

It would be preferable if you didn't worship anything.


5) Escatological end-time utopia of happyness on Earth

No, just the result of centuries of class conflict and revolution.


Of course it isn't a religion. What sort of fool would think that?

You couldn't have asked a better question.

[TC]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28 2006, 05:19 PM
Easy, a structured belief in the existance of the supernatural.

Any other questions?
yah, exactly...


Marxian politics, even the ridiculous types like Juche and Anarcho-Communism, base their beliefs in materialism, in what can be empirically evaluated, in arguments of evidence and logic and a desirable outcome from a human perspective rather than arguments that need to appeal to faith.

[Janus]

Whoah, I just noticed how old this thread was after I saw redstar's post.


Marxian politics, even the ridiculous types like Juche and Anarcho-Communism
I wouldn't really consider anarcho-communism to be a part of Marxian politics.

[ichneumon]

Me: sustainable socialism/permaculturalist

politics is not left/right. that is dualist nonsense. one must have social justice, via socialism before permaculture is possible. hungry people do not care about the future.

to my credit, i read the riot act to a cryptofascist in a lab meeting last month. she proposed using the technology of epidemiology to isolate carriers of "infectious memes" so that they can't spread their "disease" to the right thinking people of the world.

yes, i have unconventional ideas:

1)Jared Diamond writes more truth on one page than Marx did in his whole life.
2)Religion is a powerful tool that should be used rather than opposed.
3)Dogmatism, of any type, is unforgivable and a sign of fanaticism. All fanatics are fascists.
4)Regardless of what you believe or think you know, if you run around killing people for it, you are insane and need help.

So what? Should I be purged? If you cannot adapt, you will be forgotten. The whole Marxasaurus thing is very, very tired.

About the supernatural:

If, tomorrow, a superpowerful alien calling himself Baphomet came down from the stars in a flying car and threw thunderbolts, would that be supernatural?

No, because it happened. "Supernatural" *means* things that are not real or have not yet happened. The scientific rationalist viewpoint is that there is no such thing. Is parting the red sea supernatural? Only if it didn't happen. FTL travel is supernatural. Most "rationalists" like to believe that is possible. Yet the bit about the red sea? No way. But that is most certainly possible. The point being, the whole bit about "supernatural" is semantics. You can't redefine what is and is not possible every moment based on what you see. That doesn't *do* anything other than you getting to say you are always right.

Whether you like it or not, this is how REAL scientists think. Did Jesus raise the dead or just know CPR? You just DO NOT make judgements about the veracity of things you can't test empirically. There is no scientific evidence *whatsoever* about the nonexistence of God - because A)we can't a agree on a meaning for "God", B)it would involve, I suspect, experimenting on humans, and C)what the hell kind of experiment would you design?

[Janus]

Religion is a powerful tool that should be used rather than opposed.
So is mind control and terrorism, should we use that as well? Wait, those are included in religion...

[More Fire for the People]

The phrase ‘state communism’ is a contradiction. Communism is a historical condition where the state, classes, and scarcity do not exist. I will presume you mean statist development of socialism, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is nothing supernatural about the dictatorship of the proletariat.

[LSD]

Jared Diamond writes more truth on one page than Marx did in his whole life.

:lol:

Jared Diamond's good at his profession, but he's not a political scientist and he hasn't had a tenth of the political Impact of Marx.

Even anti-Marxists cannot help but acknowledged Marx's importance on the history of the world. You'd have to search an psych ward before you'd find significant numbers of people who hold Diamond of greater importance than Karl Marx.


Religion is a powerful tool that should be used rather than opposed.

That's what Stalinists say about the State. It can be "used" to serve a "higher purpose". The rest of us, however, know better than that.

Exploitative or oppressive institutions cannot be "used" to serve noble purposes, no matter how "powerful" they may be. Religion by its nature is a regressive, exploitative, and stultyfying social force which, no matter how good the intentions of the progenator, cannot help but do great societal harm.

The founders of Christianity and Islam also thought that they could "do good" through religion, but today we see what incredible damage their legacies is continuing to inflict on the world.

Fooling people "for their own good" never works and threatening people with "divine punishment" is not liberty, it's theocratic enslavement.


Regardless of what you believe or think you know, if you run around killing people for it, you are insane and need help.

I suppose that means that you oppose the actions of the French resistance durring the second world war. After all, they "ran around killing people" (mostly Nazis) because of "what they believed".


If, tomorrow, a superpowerful alien calling himself Baphomet came down from the stars in a flying car and threw thunderbolts, would that be supernatural?

No.

"Space aliens" are not supernatural. They are, at this moment, not known to exist, but their existance does not contradict any known rules of the universe and so there is no reason that they could not be perfectly "natural".

Insofar as "throwing thunderbolds", as Arthur C. Clarke famously noted, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any "aliens" that had capacity to travel the distance between some other star system and earth would almost certainly have the technological ability to generate electrical bursts.

Hell we have that ability right now!


"Supernatural" *means* things that are not real or have not yet happened.

No, actually, supernatural means of or relating to existence outside the natural world. Get that? To existance outside of the natural world.

Things that are believed to not exist are called nonexistant, things that are believed to exist but to not adhere to know natural laws are called supernatural.

Accordingly, it's easily possible to scientifically test for the existance of the supernatural. A being of unlimited power, for instance, if found would categorically prove the existance of the supernatural. As would any human "ESP" powers that cannot be neurologically/psychologically explained.

Despite all the millions of dollars offered as prize money and the thousands of years of searching, not one claim of supernatural ability has ever been verified.

Doesn't that tell you something?


Is parting the red sea supernatural? Only if it didn't happen.

Nonsense. If it didn't happen, it didn't happen. If it did happen, however, and it happened thanks to "God's" intervention, then it was a supernatural historical event.

All efforts to establish this so far have failed though and all indications are that this event, like all other supernatural events are mere myth. That's not because "supernatural means nonexistant", but because supernatural describes a category of phenomena which materialistically speaking, we know to be false.

That is, supernatural only "means nonexistant" to materialists. To religious or superstitous people, the supernatual is very much real. And because they operate on "faith" instead of reason, the lack of any evidence for it is wholly irrelevent to them.

The idealist approach is highly illogical, however, and cannot be supported by anyone with a rational understanding of the world. Furthermore, the burden of prood lies upon the idealists to prove that their approach is logically or practically called upon.

Otherwise we must stick to the simplest option available and that is to restrict ourselves to that which can be shown to exist.


You just DO NOT make judgements about the veracity of things you can't test empirically.

Except we can test human beings empircally and therefore we know at this point what individual humans are capable using Roman Empire level technology. One of the thinks we know them not to be capable of is bringing people back from the dead.

If any human demonstrated that capacity, they would be displaying supernatural ability. So far, again, no one has been able to demosntrate any supernatural powers whatsoever either in themselves or in any one else and do we are obligated to conclude that they do not exist.

Just like we assume that the entire universe is not actually inside a giant penguin's stomack we assume that "Jesus" did not have magical powers. If tomorrow, some evidence were presented otherwise, we would have to consider it, but otherwise, we have no choice but to dismiss the "Gospels" as obvious mythology.

[ichneumon]

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem:

For any set of logic or math, there will be things that are true that cannot be explained by that set of logic.

My problem with your idea of supernatural is that you get to change what is or is not such moment by moment. In the zero-state, *everything* was supernatural. Year by year, bit by bit, it gets explained. If a Attic Greek believed in germs, that was supernatural. Today people believe in souls. So what? The jury is still out. If it can't be tested empirically, and verified by peer reviews and LOTS of statistics, science has no opinion. This includes the possibility of God, the afterlife and souls. Also, history gets rewritten all the damn time. How long ago what it that the pathetic Islander couldn't possibly have build the Big Funky Heads? The scientific thing to do is to reserve judgement. It's *unlikely* that Moses parted the Red Sea. The major problem being, I think, that LSD adheres to Positivism, which is a dead duck in the scientific world. Science understands only a tiny little bit of the universe, and there are mysteries and wonders that are probably never to be understood. We LOVE that about the universe. The whole Theory of Everything was a waste of time, a red herring, even. Give it a millenia or two, then try again.


Every single ecologist ALIVE thinks that J. Diamond is more important than Marx. The *Bible* has more power than the Manifesto - does that make it more true? Give it a hundred years. Academia, the last bastion of Marxism, is running from the Red like rats from a sinking ship. Why? Guess. Permaculture is the New Left.

Viva la Evolucion de la Revolucion!

[RedWhite]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28 2006, 05:26 PM
Is Marxism a "Religion"? (http://www.redstar2000papers.com/theory.php?subaction=showfull&id=1101735552&archive=&cnshow=headlines&start_from=&ucat=&)

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/223.gif
Is this supposed to take me to a "NOT FOUND" page? ^.^;;

I don't understand the need to abolish all religion within a communist society. I understand the sue of religion to control people (catholocism) so on that level I get it, but what about those people who practice alone or within a small group? Would that still be outlawed? If it were, I'd have to practice either behind the Law's back, or out in the open, blatant and defiant.

[Eleutherios]

Catholicism is not the only religion used to control people. And if you agree that it does control people, would you support its abolition?

The point is not to force everybody who believes in God to stop, although it would be nice if they did. The point is to stop things like the use of public land to promote authoritarian superstitions or the indoctrination of children into authoritarian superstitions. It is a crime to teach children that they have to unquestioningly obey and worship a totalitarian dictator, be it Hitler or Mussolini or God, so that has to be stopped. And if nobody is being indoctrinated into God worship as a child, how many people are going to buy it once they reach the age where they can think things through for themselves? Religion requires a fresh batch of supple young minds to prey on every generation, and if we break the cycle there's no way it can infect nearly as many minds as it does now.

[YSR]

RedStar2k's site is down, RedWhite. He has had a stroke and probably hasn't maintained it.